Degrees of Bennett/Specter

With Specter going down to defeat last night, I get to use this one:

1960: Kennedy/Nixon, one of the closest elections in United States history. 

OK, folks, what does that have to do with Bob Bennett and Arlen Specter?  What's the connection(s)?


Ready?


Arlen Specter, as most people know, worked for the Warren Commission, and was responsible for the "single-bullet" theory that Kennedy assassination buffs know a whole lot more about than I do.

Bennett...I'll go ahead and quote Fred Emery:

Robert Bennett had left DOT to take over the Mullen Company, a public relations firm in Washington.  This was the firm where...E. Howard Hunt had been placed since he formally retired from the agency in May 1970 after twenty-seven years service.  So Hunt, who was an old chum of Colson's, and Bennett, deemed a Colson ally, were now working together.  

The gist of it is that Bennett did some work for the White House, and was part of the network that wound up with Hunt working for the White House as one of the Plumbers.  Also, Bennett  became a lobbyist for Howard Hughes, who was all over the shadows of the Watergate story.  And that's not all!  Bennett is also, according to a deposition that he gave later, the person who told Bob Woodward in the days just after the break-in that Hunt, who still had an office at the Mullen Company (and, alas for the conspirators, still had a safe at the White House, but that's a whole 'nother story) worked for the CIA.  I should add: as far as I can tell, or at least as far as the sources I have say, Bennett didn't do anything wrong in any of this.

And that, as they used to say, is the rest of the story.  Two Senators defeated in 2010; forty or so years earlier, one was involved in the investigation of the Kennedy assassination, the other on the fringes of Watergate.